


The Last King of Winter

by apostropheS



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-09-05
Packaged: 2018-11-18 05:10:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 3
Words: 22,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11284359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apostropheS/pseuds/apostropheS
Summary: In history there have been five women who have been crowned king. Sansa Stark finds herself thrust through time as the 6th. Time travel is stupid, Sansa thinks.





	1. Chapter 1

“Now this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky,  
And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.

As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth over and back;  
For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.

-Rudyard Kipling

Jon Snow had fallen. Her horse came to a sudden stop whinnying in fear and surprise as wights tore at its flanks.

Sansa rolled to the side as the horse was rendered a large dark lump in the snow. She crawled towards where her brother lay, confusion and terror warring on her face.

Time seemed to stop in that moment. The wight tearing at her horse its whinnying lament in echoing behind her, but to Sansa it seemed as if they’re all frozen in place. The Night King, her, Jon at her feet.

Immobile in the snow, the moment she knows will come is stalled. Their death is going to be a slow thing, she thinks, as if the world and all the gods have elongated the moment so that all may watch as the last of Eddard Stark's great House fell. But Jon springs away, he rolls with the momentum and lands protectively in front of her, and staggers to one knee. The Night King looked at Sansa then, a terrible victorious grin ripped through his face. He knows he has them cornered now, Sansa needn’t turn to know the wall of wights at their back are just meters from overtaking them.

“Look upon my victory, Stark in Winterfell. I have already taken your brother; he lies pinned to the trees in your godswood, a feast for crows,” his voice echoes in her head like a thunderclap, “And the Stark that lies at your feet is not far from Death’s embrace.”

He grabs Jon by the neck and holds him in place.

At some point, Sansa does not quite know when, she had grabbed Jon’s sword, because it now protruded inelegantly from the Night King’s thigh. He staggered back, a movement Jon used to twist and escape from its grasp. Sansa already had Jon draped across her shoulder and the two of them run, as best they can, away. She can hear the roar of the Night King behind her, she can feel his footsteps down to her very bones. Sansa thinks they will never outpace him and every breath is hitched with the thought that he will rip them apart at any moment.

They collapse at the roots of the Heart Tree. Sansa is sobbing loudly and almost hysterically and her brother sighs.

When she was younger, in the few short years that Sansa was still faster and more agile than her sweet baby sister; Arya had been totling behind her as Sansa climbed one of the thick oak bookcases in her father’s library. She forget’s now which book had been so important that she tempted her mother’s wrath, but she remembers exactly the sound of her sister falling. The loud hollow thump of two year old Arya's head as it hit the stone below brought Sansa down quickly from the bookcase. Sansa was going to yell at her silliness, really, she had no business following Sansa in her pursuit of womanly knowledge! “See, I told you to stop following me! You’re just a baby!” was seconds from leaving her mouth but her sister just lay there and she sighed; this slow painful sound that sounded nothing like the loud obnoxious child that seemed to shadow Sansa's every waking step. Sansa panicked then, right and true panic and she pulled her hand back and slapped Arya straight across her face. The force of the slap was enough to pull Arya out of whatever stupor she had fallen in and she began to wail, loud and clear. The sigh, slow and pained and dazed, was the same now as then and for whatever reason, perhaps fraternal piety, it pulls Sansa out of her own hysterical head and forces her to quickly and quietly take stock.

Valerian swords: none, between the two of them neither thought to retrieve the sword from the monster that was currently impaled by it.

Dragon glass: none, Jon had tried to equip their soldiers with a piece each. He warned her not to lose hers but she’d never been good with weapons of any sort and had lost it to the dead thing that had tried to eat her. The dead thing was gone now, but so was her piece of dragon glass.

Starks: two, though one was slowly bleeding to death.

“Sansa”, Jon says wiping the blood dripping from one corner of her mouth, “have you any Dragonglass? Anything we could use to-"

“I-I’m useless!”She shakes her head, "I shouldn’t have gone out there to find you.” She says, perhaps if she’d stayed in the castle Jon would not have been struck down in surprise. Perhaps he’d be riding back now, with Arya at his back, through the gates of Winterfell. She whispers,"It’s my fault, Jon, you were distracted…I-I should have died in King’s Landing.”

“Never say that, never even think it. Where would I be if you hadn’t found me at the base of Castle Black?"

“Alive and well in the East.” She sighs. They both look at each in surprise and for some reason this makes Sansa laugh loud and bright, Jon is also caught at the awful luck they’ve had and joins in. The red leaves of the Weirwood tree dance in the wind and the old snarled face at its trunk seems to grin back at them in black mirth.

When she looks at Jon all mirth is wiped from her face. Her brother looks grim, “Run Sansa. Take Ghost and run as fast and as far as you can. I’ll hold him off for as long as I’m able.”

“No!” She yells and she sees him then, standing in the distance. The Night’s King had come for them at last.

“There’s no other way!” Jon yells back and stands, at the ready.

“I’m never leaving you.” She stands too. Never.

He looks at her, the snow caught in her eyelashes, and her pale white face set in determination. She had told him once before that she would not live long should he fall in battle. She meant it now too.

“Aye, we go together, or not at all, then.” Jon says, he’s bleeding heavily from his side and down his face. He’s dying, Sansa can’t imagine what terrible strength he must posses to still be conscious.

This is her fault, she thinks. The sequence of events started, as she’s come to know such things always do, with Littlefinger.

His presence after her brother’s impromptu coronation as King in the North had her constantly guarded. She knew he was playing her, drawing on her desire for Winterfell, and the deeper darker need for self efficacy, to not only survive in this life but to thrive. He was using these things against her, half lies and truths used to push her one way or the other. Telling her Jon was not her brother, that he was Aunt Lyanna’s and that he had no place as King in the North. How he was privy to this information, she did not know. Usurper, mockingbird, he called him, here to steal his little bird’s nest.

She recognized the pattern. He had used it once before, in trying to convince her to marry Ramsey. She had been fooled once in thinking she was making the wise choice through her own hardwon agency. She would not be fooled again. She was no bird. She was a wolf of the North. And wolves stayed with the pack.

But…his words brought chaos. Perhaps that had been his intention all along. Not to cause her to action, but to stay her hand, immobilize her when an act would prove the wiser.

She didn’t know whether the choices she was making were of her own volition or through his influence and it infuriated her. She had paced the length of her chambers countless times in the time after Jon was named King in the North. Jon's bid for trust only fueled her anger at her impotency. How could she trust him? When she didn’t even trust herself. Littlefinger’s treacherous whispers permeated her head, “Sweetling,” it said, “he has no ties, at best he is usurping what is yours by birthright, at worst he will die betrayed and alone leaving you to the mercy of your enemies…or to me.”

They always seemed to be fighting these days. She and Jon. Dancing around each other with things left unsaid. Every conversation left her dissatisfied and restless, she wanted to shake him, save him. Fold him in half and keep him in her pocket close to her heart, like a small token of affection. He was all that was left to her of her brave father— even if Littlefinger's lies turned out to be true— and he persisted in following in his wake. She had seen what happened to men like her father.

What could she do? What could she do when Jon’s focus lay beyond the wall, when it should also be South to the game that was being played without him. A game that would be be oh so ruinous if it was allowed to continue. She and Jon had had an awful row in his chambers.

“Let them play their games,” he had said, his hair was pulled back from his face in a knot at the base of his skull. It made him seem younger and fairer, “it doesn’t matter who sits the iron throne, not when we’ll most likely be walking dead if we don’t focus to what lies beyond the wall.”

“I’m not saying to disregard the wall, Jon, I’m only telling you not to disregard what’s happening in King’s Landing! You don’t know Cersei, she doesn’t follow the rules of war,” she says, her face flushed in the heat of the fire in the hearth, “ She’s a snake in the grass, Jon, if you do not pay attention she will strike you down before any dead thing will.”

She should have paid heed to her own words. Cersei was not the only snake in the grass. The next day he’d cornered her in the garden, the snow had just fallen and it muffled the sound of his footsteps.

“Lady Sansa,” Littlefinger said, “I had hoped I’d find you here.”

“How may I help you, lord Baelish?” she said.

“I’ve heard news,” he said, “There has been sighting of a girl that looks like Arya Stark not far from the outskirts of Winterfell.”

“Arya?” she said disbelieving, she dared not hope, “Where and how have you come by this information?”

“Sansa,” Bealish tutted, “you should know better, perhaps I should impart further education.”

“There’s no need, Lord Baelish,” she said, her voice was low, calculated to sound bored enough to mask the excitement in her body, "but the sighting of a girl fitting Arya’s description is not much to go on. I feel perhaps the cold of the North does not much agree with your spies.”

Baelish eyed her keenly, he was still very difficult to read. What benefit did imparting this information hold for him? Did he think her gratitude would ameliorate her disdain?

“She carried a very peculiar sword,” he said, “Small and thin, almost like a needle."

Jon’s Needle. Arya’s needle.

“Take me to where she was seen.”

“Your brother has gone out to fetch her-“

“Thank you lord Baelish, that will be all.”

This is how she found herself in the snow without Brienne or her faithful squire. Just feet from Jon and the Night King. Had the White Walkers set an ambush? She did not know.

Littlefinger had once asked her: What do we say about coincidence?

The universe is rarely so lazy, she’d said and then imparted upon her an...education.

Her only comfort in all this was that Baelish was most likely a White Walkers pin cushion by now.

So here she now stood, her brother at her side, the last of her great and ancient family. The beast kills Ghost first, her brother quickly follows. She lifts Jon's dragon glass from where it had been thrown in the snow. She doesn’t really know what she intends to do with it, she doubts she’d be as lucky as before. The snow now holds the last of her great family: if she dies here, will there be anyone left to tend to their bones, as father had done for Lyanna? As she had done for Rickon not too long ago?

The Night King speaks into her mind, a spike of ice, shrill and victorious,"You are the The Stark In Winterfell?” it asked, “I’ll gladly take your heart.”

He leans close, she presses her back tightly against the trunk of the Heart Tree.

“My heart?” She says desperate and angry, and remembers half forgotten stories from Old Nan, whispers in the rustling leaves: that there must always be a Stark in Winterfell, of contracts sealed in blood and magic and wood, “I am Sansa Stark, the last King of Winter. There shall always be a Stark in Winterfell, but if you want my heart, then have it!”

She takes the dragon glass and drives it into her breast, the shard piercing flesh and wood alike, pinning her to the Heart Tree in the ruins of Winterfell.

—-------------

She wakes screaming. The pain in her chest is suffocating and deafening. All she can hear is the thunderous sound of the blood rushing through her veins. Her screaming continues, her long red hair loosed from her braid and sticking to her sweaty flushed face. She feels cold hands grab her and she thinks: the Night King has got a final hold of her.

She pulls away in terror. There are sounds and smells and faces that should only exist in memories but are now assaulting her every sense. She sees her mother’s pale worried face, her hands up in supplication; and suddenly Sansa realizes her mother is pleading, praying that Sansa calm, that she is safe, that she is home.

The door to her childhood chambers opens and in steps her father; tall and powerful and alive. The last thing Sansa thinks before she faints is that she’s finally, finally gone mad.

\------------------

“Death is a strange thing.” she says flatly once she regains consciousness, she’s back in the bed and her mother lovingly spreads a cool washcloth across her fair forehead. It feels heavenly, Sansa sighs, “I guess Jon was wrong.”

“My sweet babe,” her mother sobs and she gathers Sansa up in her arms. Her mother feels bigger than she remembers, more solid. Real. “Sansa, my darling!”

“Momma? How are you here?”

“You’re home, dearest.”

Oh, what a beautiful dream! How sweet to be in her mother’s embrace, warm and loved and safe.

“This isn’t a dream Sansa! You’ve been unconscious for days. We found you cold as ice and senseless beneath the crypts of Winterfell. My darling child, I thought I’d lose you.”

Sansa looks at her mother. Every detail, every line on her fine mother’s face is rendered perfectly. The cornflower blue of her eyes. The softer pale blue line of a vein down the side of her jawline. She sees three white hairs at her mother’s temple, they are woven into the thick mane of hair that makes up her braid. If this was some sort of conjuring... it was perfect, it had been years since her mother’s death. Sansa had often feared her mother’s face was slowly loosing focus in her mind’s eye, she could no longer remember the true color of her mother’s eyes, yet here they were a true blue like the flowers that grew in the springtime in the valleys of the Vale. Sansa grabbed a candle from her bedside table.

Her mother screamed when she plunged her arm into its small flame. The smell of burnt hair and the fast searing pain of her burnt arm had Sansa leaping from the bed.

“This is real! You’re alive! This is real!” She sobbed. Sansa’s knees give out from under her and her mother is there. She’s right there, cradling her head and saying sweet soothing words that Sansa doesn’t understand but she feels, because her mother’s chest is pressed right against her ear and the soft thump of her mother’s heart drums a constant beat into her very soul.

When she wakes a third time it is to her mother’s face as she sleeps beside her bed. Sansa does not wake her, but she pinches herself hard, once, just to make sure.

Her arm is bandaged. The burn nothing but a dull ache—and she can smell the strong smell of aloe, a salve—

coming from beneath the bandage.

She still thinks this cannot be real. There’s the basin and her mirror in the western corner of her room; just as there always was, before. A small stack of books— fairy tales, fictions— rests on the bedside table. Her needlework by a vase with flowers.

She’s wet the bed.

She is younger, her body changed to that of a girl on the cusp of womanhood. She has no scars.

She looks at the expanse of soft pale skin. Ah, so it’s just the memories of Ramsey, then.

She get’s up to strip the bed of its linens. Her mother is still sleeping. She is suddenly annoyed.

“I have gone mad.”

—-----------------

“Momma,” she whispers softly, she hasn’t called her that since she was a babe, “Mother.”

“Sansa,” Her mother is up instantly, “How do you fare?”

“I’m better now, Mother,” she says, trying to keep her voice neutral, “I had a terrible dream.”

“It’s all passed now, my darling,” her mother says, “It’s just a momentary sickness, nothing to worry. Heaven knows how often I’ve had to sit by your brothers’s bedside when they’d had a bit of a chill.”

“But I’m much better now.” Sansa agrees, her mother is babbling a little in her worry, the words as much a comfort to herself as to Sansa. Sansa bathes in the timbre of her mother’s soothing voice, “Just a chill and a bad dream.”

Her mother’s chin trembles, she stops making the bed and takes Sansa in her arms again, just as her father walks in through the door.

“I’ll have the kitchen prepare a broth.” she says, wipes at her eyes and leaves.

Sansa does not think she is ready for this.

Her father takes the seat her mother vacated. She can smell his aftershave, mint and something else— she can’t place it—but she knows instantly she could spend the rest of her days trying to figure it out.

“Papa.” She sighs, her voice a tiny thing.

Oh, the skin at his neck is smooth. No scars, she thinks deliriously. The room starts to spin and she doubles over and retches.

She’s going through big heaving sobs, and her father pats soothing circles on her back, his hand heavy and deliberate, murmuring softly that it would soon pass.

“There, there, Sansa, just let it all out, you’ve had a long few days.” Her father says.

“Very long, Father. A lifetime.” she says her voice warble-y and thick. Her eyes sting from the tears and the heaving.

It must be magic, she thinks. Whatever magic the White Walkers possessed, or Winterfell. Both. Neither. She didn’t know. Rationally, nothing makes sense. Somehow, through some miracle, she is back in her childhood home, the Winterfell that was before she left with her Father to King’s Landing. Her last memories were of Jon and the blooming red flower beneath their bodies in the snow.

She needed, desperately, her father’s council. Had she been given a second chance? Would the events that had transpired in her timeline fall like vultures in this place, in this Winterfell? By what grace had she been given this foresight?

Could her fate, that of her House, be set in stone or had she been given the opportunity to right the wrongs that had been done to them. Did she have that power? Could she stop the hand of fate as it came to crush her family?

“Father, tell me about the Others.”

—-------------------------

She didn’t know what she expected. The days bed bound had begun to blend and blur together.

"These are only stories, told to make naughty children listen to their elders. I will tell you all the stories you want if you will tell me one of your own first: why you were in the crypts. But now you must rest."

She was able to glean bits and pieces from the servants and her mother about where they had presumadly found her. She hadn’t been in the crypts among the roots and cobwebs, she had been pinned to the heart tree in the godswood of Winterfell; in the cold embrace of a man borne of ice. She could not tell this story to her father. She could lie of course, but it felt wrong to deceive her father. It caused a deep revulsion, to lie to Eddard Stark.

She would have to be clever. But cleverness would keep for the morrow, for suddenly she was bone weary. As soon as her head hit the pillow she was fast asleep.

When she awoke, Arya was trying to fight a ghost near the foot of her bed. Oh Arya! How cross she’d be at eleven to learn that she was not much bigger at sixteen!

“Oh! You’re awake now,” she said, ceasing her fencing pantomime. “Jon said you had died. And you drooled on his neck.”

“I imagine Jon says a great deal of things,” she says haughtily, she rubs a sore spot on her chest, a dull throbbing ache, where her heart had been pierced in another life, “Only half of which are correct. And I did not drool.”

"Well, I’m glad you’re better, just the same.” Arya replied ducking her face and making her way to the door.

“I—I love you, Arya. I haven’t said it much, or at all, really. But I do, just the same.”Sansa says hurriedly, because it was true, and because deep down she feared this may all end suddenly.

“You must have drooled! If you’re trying niceties on me!” Arya said, but she was smiling wide and happy as she left.

Sansa never felt such panic suddenly. To lose this again, she would not be able to bare it. It would break her beyond repair. Sansa got up and dressed. She peeked out of the door and stealthily made her way to her father’s library, with no one the wiser. Father would return soon and with him questions she was not yet sure how to answer.

She looked as best she could through her father’s collection of lore, surely amongst these books there was something of the White Walkers. Of Winterfell and its magic. Her endeavors left her empty handed if her father did posses literature concerning magic and the White Walkers, he did not keep it here.

Suddenly there was a knock on the door, she ducked behind the desk.

“Father,” Jon began, “Are you— Sansa.”

“Jon.”

They both spoke at once. Sansa flushed to the roots of her hair. She wanted desperately to vault the desk and hug him, all of him, down to his very teenaged scowl. She felt giddy.

“Erm,” he cleared his throat and then asked shyly, “How are you feeling?”

“I’m better.” She said, she was thirteen now, so he must be sixteen if a day. She could not keep from smiling,“I was looking for a book.”

He bowed his head a little, his lips tilting up ever so slightly upwards. He bid her an awkward goodbye. Sansa just stood there, half expecting him to turn back and capture her in his arms so that they could both revel in their mutual aliveness. But he was not yet the Jon she knew. This was a painfully young man, shy and modest. And she had never been kind.

“Wait,” She said suddenly, Jon paused at the door he looked at her with a dark penetrating gaze, but her mind drew a sudden blank.

“Did I— drool?” she finished lamely. She silently berated herself, where was her cleverness? Had her mind stunted at thirteen as well? She must have been dull as a child.

“Did Arya tell you that?” he flushed a deep red, “I just said that when I carried you, my neck was wet. That is all. I thought, perhaps it had been... your tears.”

“I was crying? And you found me?” she asked, “In the crypts.”

“Aye, I thought perhaps that’s where you’d gone,” he said, “since all else was exhausted.”

“Oh,” she said, “Thank you, for rescuing me. And— I’m sorry... for the tears.”

“Never be sorry for that, Sansa.” He said, his face serious and pale against his dark unruly hair. And with that he left.

—----------------------

She was eighteen years old. A woman grown: she had survived King’s Landing, survived Littlefinger and Ramsey. She very probably survived the Night’s King. How was she unable to survive through geography lessons?

Arya had dozed off ages ago, but she was loathe to do the same when she very clearly remembered berating her only sister on exactly that point years ago. Thankfully, lessons did not last much longer and soon the Maester dismissed them to their chores.

Her father had come that morning, she could sense his need to have things in his home return to their quiet simplicity. He had been kind and stubborn, just as she’d remembered him, and through tears that were not all feigned she told him she had entered the crypts to find a flower. She’d read the Blue Dahlia had a deep royal purple shade, a perfect dye for her thread, and grew best in the damp darkness of caves. Dahlias represented dignity and instability, as well as meaning 'my gratitude exceeds your care’, in the language of flowers she told the truth that she was unable to confess.

The crypts were like a cave, weren’t they, papa? She had asked. But she slipped and hit her head. She did not remember anything else. She felt a low thing when her father smiled and looked at her adoringly. She was lying. It must be a sickness she thought, to be able to lie so convincingly. Littlefinger’s sickness, she was sure. Her father warned her not to go off alone anymore in search of colorful thread, to take Jane. To never leave Winterfell. Sansa had burst into tears at the thought. That part had not been feigned.

Sansa frowned. Every hour that passed, she was finding it harder and harder to be like the Sansa that existed five years ago. How do you fit a squared peg into a rounded hole? She had been chipped and chiseled and formed into this pointed shape and she could never hope to return to the soft roundedness of her childhood. She was unfailingly polite, but she was darker now. There was a shadow to her that she could not easily hide from those around her. Her mother saw it, and Sansa knew it worried the lines at her mother's temples. Jon noticed too. Lady Catelyn was perhaps most worried about the state of her daughter coming to attention to Jon Snow.

She had yet to find the words to convince her father not to go to King’s Landing when the King comes to call in a time not too long from now. Every scenario she posited ended in her father’s dismissal as the rambling worries of a child at best and the raving lunacy of a woman at worst. She had taken to brooding with her needlework in hand. She often sought out quiet places in the castle, this was no easy task as it was filled with every manner of laboring in nearly every corner. It was bittersweet to know the noise and life that filled the castle would cause her such consternation. Both in its later absence and current presence.

She would almost always run into Jon. They kept each other quiet company. She’d be at her needlework, he with the upkeep of his training sword. She nearly called it Longclaw, once. She wonders if he’ll still receive it now that she plans to change things. She could not help but feel that they were all doomed.

“It’s done.” She proclaims on the sixth day of her waking. Jon is sitting to her right, close enough that if she reached out she could touch him but far enough away where it would not seem improper to any wandering eyes. She gathers the kerchief and folds it neatly into a square. She should press it first, but this will be the first thing this Sansa has ever made for this Jon Snow and she is giddy with excitement.

“I made this for you,” she turns to him and hands him the kerchief stitched with the form of their House sigil and below that his initials, J.S.

She has stitched Ghost. Though he does not know this, Ghost is just a pup waiting to be found by Jon and her Father. She counted down the days until she met Lady once again, the needle work helped, as it always had, to keep her busy.

“I,” he began, his every movement screamed apprehension, “I can’t accept this.”

“Why ever not?” she asked, “The proper words you’re searching for are: 'thank you, Sansa, your hard work is a marvel.'”

Jon looks at her, then away, his profile hard and angry and humiliated. “I cannot accept— the sigil of your House and my name—it isn’t right. It isn’t proper.”

“Oh, Jon,” she whispers, she’d had this argument so many times with him already in another life. “You are a Stark as much as I am a Tully.” She looks at him sadly, for in at a happier, ignorant time she had thought the same thing as he. Experience had taught her the truth through cruelty and shame. “Titles, sigils, names…these do not define us. It is not so much the circumstance of our birth, but what we choose do with that life that defines us.”

Jon looks at her intently. His gray eyes, so dark they were often mistaken for black, pierced her. She had very rarely been the sole of his focus before. Surely, when they were fighting he must have looked at her like this. But she had been angry then, and does not recall.

“You are different.” He says. It is a statement of fact, but it scares her, how his eyes seemed to convince her to give him her confidence. The power he holds over her scares her: this child filled with shame and inexperience. She wanted to keep him at her side, a faithful friend and confidant, to share with him a little of her burden as she had that dark day when she found him at the base of Castle Black. Brother, cousin, king, friend. What ever title he so chose he’d always mean the same to her. She wants to tell him of her love for him. The fierce unrelenting feeling that he provoked in her, the thought that he could ever betray her had the power to send her into a frenzy that she could not easily escape. This frightening and perilous love, when she was but a stranger to him now.

She wants to hold his hands— this is not out of sentiment or caprice, but from a deeper sense of survival. She wants to tell him of how their House had not just fallen but had been plundered, ruined, raped. She wants to tell him that he’d been murdered. That his flesh had been pierced, as hers had been pierced, by monsters who wore the guise of men. She wants to tell him that they’d butchered Robb and her mother. That Arya had fallen. Bran, disembowled and pinned to the trees in the godswood. That Rickon had been shot through the heart by an arrow. That their great father had been…!

“I’ve only grown, Jon,” She said simply instead, “We must all grow sometime. It is just— more violent for some than others.”

“Has someone done you violence, Sansa?” He asked her suddenly, he’s close to her now, facing her with those terrible, convincing eyes. “Has someone hurt you?”

“I— no,” she said quickly, “I was alone and it was dark where I was, I thought I’d never see the light of day again. Until I found you.”

“I found you.” he replied.

“Of course.” she said. Placed the kerchief in his hands and fled.

\----------------------------------

 

Sansa meets Lady on a sunny day. She falls to her knees and cradles the pup.

“Lady,” she whispers, her mother watches her intently from the archway of the courtyard, “I won’t fail you this time. No one will ever take you from me again.”

Weeks pass, Lady grows strong and fierce. She’s protective of her wolf siblings and of Sansa most of all. The dire wolf spends most of her time at her mistress’ side, Sansa’s fingers curled on the mass of fur at the wolf’s nape. If Lady is here Sansa knows the Baratheon king and the hell spawn would be arriving soon. She is not prepared.

She keeps to her chambers. She writes down everything she can remember from her time. When the Baratheon comes, who is with him, when they leave. The timeline of her father’s death is unclear and to her utter shame and misery she finds that the details that had led up to his death are hazy. She couldn’t remember who her father had met with the night before his imprisonment. The whens and whos escaped her now as they had then. What a foolish girl she was. Why hadn’t she paid closer attention! In her madness she writes down everything she can recall. The color of the queens dress, the sounds outside her room in King’s Landing, all these things she writes down. Her fingertips are dark stained with quill ink, and she has since stopped trying to wash the darkness away. It is a striking distinction. She’s begun to frighten the servants.

Her father’s books surround her like a wall, Lady the ever present guardian at its gates. She’s found little so far and she has precious little time. A few stanzas on the children of the forest told of their blood magic. Another told of the first men and their pact with the Children. Any talk of magic or sorcery was relegated to folklore, fairy tales from ancient times. One phrase was repeated over and over: There must always be a Stark in Winterfell.

What did this mean? Why had the Night’s King used it almost as a title? As far as she recalled there was never a time when a Stark did not reside in Winterfell. Years ago when her father had left in search of his beloved sister there had only been a single person with Stark blood running through their veins within the walls of the castle. With father gone, her uncle Benjen had been left in his stead. If her uncle had ever left Winterfell in those few short months, then the castle would have been left without a Stark until the birth of Robb. If her uncle had left Winterfell…? Could that have somehow been the beginning of the rise in power of the White Walkers? Had the heart and strength of Winterfell been tied to magic by the bloodlines of her great family? Only to have been weakened by the scarcity of those with Stark blood?

Her uncle only cemented her suspicions, when she’d asked. His face had turned hard and shuttered. Telling her only of the names of books he had found in the library of castle Black and nothing else. She meant to warn him: "be weary, uncle,” she had told him. "The White Walkers are as real as you or I. They grow in strength and number."

Whether he believed her or thought her just an imaginative child, she did not know. He was gone the next day.

How reckless she’d been! So preoccupied with politics she’d spared little for the very real threat of the White Walkers. What a fool she’d been, urging Jon to discard his negligence towards the South when she herself had done the same to what lay beyond the Wall. She had been at the Wall, but she may as well have been on the moon for how much of it she’d explored. Jon had warned her of the deadly sorcery that lay beyond its icy length, but she’d put the thought away, focusing on getting Winterfell to rights.

What had urged her to speak those words the night of her apparent suicide? Had some spirit of the old gods possessed her that night? Had the ancient King’s of Winter come to call upon her free will, as the last living Stark heir, while she stood above the soil that entombed their bones? And time? Was time just an illusion that the hand of fate wrapped around her finger? A red thread that she wound and unwound and wound again like a cat with a ball of yarn.

\-----------------------

She saw it happen, not because she was skulking, but because she was prudent about how she rounded corners. Theon had said something derogatory, the usual unimaginative things insecure young men say when they have been bested. But it was Jon’s reaction which had her paying attention. He didn’t reply, which was not uncommon with the Jon she knew. When met with opposition he had a sort of stalwart stance and intensity that made you wish he’d speak if only to dispel the image of lethal intent. But this Jon just looked down in silent absence, in uncommon acquiescence. It was jarring and unreal and it frightened her deeply.

“You shouldn’t let him speak to you that way.” She said, once he was alone in the courtyard.

“Its best if I ignore it, trust me.”

“If you say nothing he’ll never respect you, it’ll—“ She persisted, if only to draw out something of the Jon she knew. Some familiarity to ground her when it seemed as if the earth was shifting unsteadily beneath her feet.

“Respect? Why should the bastard son of a northern lord command respect?”

“Why are you like this? There’s more to integrity than who your parents are.”

“So says the lords daughter.” he replied, all pretense of casual conversation gone.

“Don’t—,” she breathed, “As a son of this house you have certain privileges that I could never hope for.”

“Sansa,” he says slowly as if speaking to a young, particularly slow child, “I have no position, or title or value except as a brother of the Night’s Watch, should father allow it.”

"My value, Jon Snow, will be contingent upon the rape at my wedding night. Do not presume to think you alone suffer the tragedy of one's birth. Integrity, dignity in the face of opposition, these are the only things left to us when this wicked world has taken everything else.” She made to push past him, uncharacteristically physical when her best weapons were her words, but he held her arm.  
Not forcefully or demanding, but it was enough to root her in place.

“What do you want from me?” he said lowly, like they shared some intimate secret and not just a small handkerchief given and received.

"What more do you want from me?" he repeated, “You’ve been following me. It’s not obvious. I’m not sure it’s even intentional, but you’re suddenly there, when a few weeks ago we may as well have been strangers. So I ask, what does the Lady want of me?"

“I want you to be—more, more than what you now think you are,” she said, “I don’t know. I thought we could be…friends.”

“We were never friends,” he replied and released her arm, it hung heavy and unmoored at her side.

“No. We weren’t. But we could be.” She replied.

\-----------------------  
"I saw you having a very spirited conversation with Jon, today.”  
“Is that so, mother.”  
“What made you two seem so…lively?”  
“Oh, nothing in particular. Just talking, being polite.”  
“It looked a bit more than politeness, dear,” her mother said, “But I suppose those boys, your brother included, can be rather rough around the edges where manners are concerned. Your brother is so popular with the ladies, I fear the trouble his sort of politeness may bring. Jon is handsome too, I suppose. Don’t you think?”  
“I suppose so. Sulky and rigid, but he has a pleasant enough face.”

\-----------------------------

 

She’s in the kitchens retrieving a quill knife and a new pot of ink. The walk to the kitchens helped organize her thoughts when her writing began to look more like gibberish and less a conscious thought. In her head she could hear Littlefinger’s voice of warning, that nothing is as real as there is evidence for, when rumor does not suffice. When Arya passes by her like a bat out of hell, Sansa’s quills go flying in air.

“Arya!”

“Sansa! Father’s going to behead someone!” Arya said without preamble, “A deserter, from the Night’s Watch!”

Sansa fingers feel numb all of a sudden, the half filled ink pot slips from her hands and as the inky mess spreads along the cracks of the cold stone beneath her feet she realizes that here might just be the opportunity she needed to know what was happening at the Wall. A man fresh from the Night’s Watch, the closest thing she had to a first hand experience with what lay beyond the Wall.

She picks up her skirts and runs to her father’s study, reaching it just as the messenger bearing news of the captured deserter is leaving. Her father is fastening Ice and its scabbard around his waist as she enters the room and shuts the door behind her.

“Sansa,” he says, surprise evident in his voice.

“Father, I have heard the news regarding the deserter,” she says, she had been prepared to lie, but deceit seems a fickle mistress this day and she can’t quite grasp its slippery tail, “I have come to plead you stay your hand until I have a moment to speak to him.”

“What does my daughter have to say to a deserter of the Night’s Watch and what possible reason would there be for her to listen to what he has to say in turn?” Her father says.

“I wish to speak to him, if you’ll only grant me a few minutes—”

“Sansa.” her father begins warningly and she can see that he’s losing patience, “What’s gotten into you, child?”

“Papa, please,” She begs, because she cannot find a way to speak to her father without the truth tumbling out of her treacherous mouth. She’s a hairsbreadth from flinging herself to him, grabbing onto his legs with all her limbs and never letting go, as it is, “I wish to learn more about what lies beyond the Wall.”

"Beyond the wall, Sansa? What fascination has ensnared your mind so? You’ve been locked away in your rooms for days on end, you no longer sing or dance. You step into a room as if ghosts await you, you hardly eat or sleep. Your mother is beside herself. You’ve taken books from the library without permission. What has befallen you, my darling? What secrets have taken a hold of you so completely?”

“It’s only curiosity, Father.”

“Curiosity?” her father asked disbelievingly. "Mere curiosity does not drive one to seclusion. Curiosity does not transform the beautiful sunshine that was once my daughter and left a pale shadow in its wake,” her father sighs, he looks older suddenly, he continues tenderly, “I’m only trying to help, my darling. Please confide in me. Tell me what ails you. Is it— a woman’s ailment?”

Oh, papa, she thinks. Her face contorts with sudden mirth and madness. Her father’s face is bewildered and sincere. To think her the common victim of puberty! But beneath the question, his tender words all the more beautiful for what they imply; that he’d fix whatever was wrong. That with his power and faith he’d right the wrongs that were hurting his child so. In another time she’d believed him, that he truly could right all the wrongs in the world, that he was strong, and that nothing evil could touch his virtuous soul. How wrong she’d been. All that glitters was not gold. Beautiful souls do not long live in this cruel and ugly world. Perhaps her father had known this, perhaps that is why he’d isolated his family here in Winterfell after the death of his brother, sister, and father. As best he could he sheltered them from the traitorous world that lay beyond the boundaries of their ancestral lands. She takes a step back and looks at her father. Trully looks at him, not as a child gazing at a parent, but as a fellow lost soul.

“If it were only something so mundane! I understand now, father,” her face is bright with dawning realization, “The seclusion of our family within Winterfell, after the death of your sister. It was self preservation. I understand what you did and why. This world is not made for the virtuous.”

Her father was stunned into silence. He sat in his chair, the hard oak groaned in protest. He looked like the wind was knocked out of him. He looked both younger and older than she'd ever seen him.

She hugged him, her tear streaked face buried in his neck and the fur of his cowl and whispered, “I have learned terrible truths, Father. You’re spirited away to King’s Landing to never return. Robb is betrayed and with him the castle falls. Our bannermen die or betray their sworn oaths. Jon is crowned King in the North and dies at the hands of a monster borne of ice. The Stark line is extinguished come winter.”

“Sansa, what are you saying? Surely you were dreaming, my darling, you were frightened in the crypts.”

“It is prophecy, father,” She continued, “and it spoke of fraternal piety. That you saved a babe borne from a stolen sister and claimed him as your own, never realizing that your journey may have started the chain of events that have lead me here.”

“Sansa,” he held her away from him to look her fully in the face, his face is ashen, “Who has told you this? How do you know?”

“I speak the truth, father! You asked me what ails me? These things! Annhialation has come for the Stark bloodline. There will be no one left to bury our bones in the crypts! This is what obsesses me, this is why you must grant me leave to speak to this condemned man, before we too are condemned!” she’s sobbing now, face red with wild emotion. She tries to wipe her face with her hands, trying to find and resemble some sort of composure. She finds it, in the deep dark spaces of her mind and looks up at her father. Perhaps he sees something in her face, in her eyes— perhaps he recognizes in her eyes something he’s seen in his own. He had, after all, been in the field of battle. So had she. Even if her battles were fought within rooms and castles; she had survived to fight another day. Perhaps it was devastation that he recognised, when it was so familiar, and he straightens, his hand resting on the hilt of Ice.

“When I return we will speak more of this, Sansa.” he says, his voice broached no argument, he had never spoken to her as such. Her father was fair to all his children, but to Sansa and Arya he was gentle in a way that was unlike that of the boys. This was not her father speaking to her now, but her liege lord. “You will not repeat what was spoken here.You will stay a step behind me. You may ask one question. This is not a request.”

“Yes, my lord Father,” she replies bowing her head, she is both exhausted and resigned, weather her father believed her or not, it was done. The gears had been set into motion.

He rests his hand on her shoulder momentarily, as she’s seen him do to Robb and Jon, and leaves. She follows in dread and anticipation.

She walks dutifully behind her father. The wet grass folds beneath her feet. The ancient stones that surround the clearing seem random in arrangement if not for a dull thrum Sansa can feel as she nears the killing block. It is the fallen trunk of a wierwood tree flanked by large granite stones. The trunk holds a soft indentation at its center as if the wood knew it would one day be a cradle for the heads of those unlucky enough to find it. Its once bleached bark now a muddied red with blood from centuries of judgement. She was never allowed here, she never dreamed of ever disobeying that rule.

Robb and Jon she had expected— standing straight and regal atop the green hill—Bran, she had not. They all look at her with wide surprised eyes, but they know better than to speak, question their father at this moment.

Lord Stark walks towards the condemned man. Face somber and determined.

The man begins to speak, but Lord Stark holds up one hand, “Sansa of House Stark, has one question she would have you answer before your execution.”

Sansa straightens. Her posture borne of nobility and nearly two decades worth of training. At thirteen she is tall for her age, nearly of height with Robb. Her stature gives her an air of someone older, fiercer than the spoiled child she used to be. She is a Wolf of Winterfell. She commands here, now, in this place of death.

“Was there, among the White Walkers number, one that was different; Taller than the rest, with ice on his brow like a crown?” Sansa asked, her voice pitched low.

“No my lady,” the man said, “I ran, after they came for my Brothers,” he said, “I know I’m a coward. I should have gone to the Warden, people must be warned. Give word to my family; tell them I’m sorry.”

“You have been found guilty of desertion. For this you shall be put to death, as the honor of this realm is its law, but know this: your words will not be forgotten.” Sansa replies, looks to her father, and bows in deference to her king. She looks up at him and he looks at her intently for a moment before turning to the condemned man.

She doesn’t remember walking back down the hill.

The castle was alight with gossip. Whispers that the eldest Stark daughter had become possessed by the old Kings ran amok. Chamber maids scurried away when they saw her pass, for fear that she’d murder them somehow. It did not help that Lady growled and nipped at their heels as they passed.

\-----------------------------  
Bran comes to her sometime after.

“Sansa, do you really think White Walkers are real?” he asks, his sweet face earnest and painfully young, “Father says they’re not real, that it was just stories told by a frightened man. You shouldn’t worry so.”

“Oh, Bran!” she sighs, the last thing she wanted was to frighten her brother. But she needed him to be wary. How do you warn a child that monsters are real without instilling a petrifying terror?

“I just want all of us to stay safe.” she says, "If it’s just stories, then I will forever be the silly sister that saw monsters in her shadow.”

“And if they’re real?”

“Then they’ll sing songs about the Stark sibling's victories over the darkness.” She says with conviction, “You’ll be Bran the… Climber, they’ll sing songs about how well you—climbed!”

“That’s a terrible name, Sansa.” he looks at her askance,"I hope they aren’t real, if only so I don’t have to endure the songs about someone as unimaginative as Bran the Climber!”

“Bran the Valiant, then, if it pleases my Lord.” She says and bows in mock deference.

“Yes, yes. That will do,” He says his voice pitched haughtily and his nose up in the air.

She feels lighter than she had in weeks, even if the servants were terrified. They giggle about it until dinner. Her siblings and mother are gathered at the table, her mother looks stern and displeased at the empty chair of her father at the head. Sansa notes that Jon is not here. But then he wouldn’t be, now would he?

A manservant comes to her mother and leans in toward her ear. She frowns and says, “Your father will not be joining us for dinner. Sansa you are to report to his offices after you’re finished.”

Sansa ate despite the fast hum of her heartbeat, her brothers' and sister looked at her forlornly at what punishment awaited her after supper. They kept glancing at her with equal measure of surprise and sympathy. Surprise because Sansa had never caused the wrath of their parents so; sympathy because Robb, Bran, Arya, and even little Rickon on occasion, had become quite proficient at it.

She enters his private office, and sits in front of his desk. Penitent but wary.

“You know the truth about Jon.” he says with out preamble. “How do you know?”

“I-I dreamt it.” Sansa stuttered.

“The truth!” His fist pounds the desk once, in frustration, her father’s voice is stern and sharp, unlike she has ever seen him and it makes the 13 year old girl inside her quake, “Who told you, who else knows!”

“No one! None know except you and I. I swear it on pain of death!”

He father covers his face with his hand. He’s weary and frightened and Sansa is terrified: of him believing her, or not. Both equally damning.

“Is this what has spawned your imagination?” her father covers his face with his hands momentarily again then retrieves a bundle from a locked drawer in his desk. He pushes the bundle towards her. It’s covered in dust and cobwebs from years entombed. It is a marriage cloak, ornate and heavy, she runs her finger along the stitching of a dragon with three heads. Nestled within it is a child’s birthing blanket and a ring she does not recognize. She takes the ring in her hands, the engraving within the band in fine thin lettering. Rheagar, and beneath it, Lyanna. The R and L of both names interlocked forming a circlet.

“I was going to burn it when she died.” her father stands and moves to the fire, lost in painful memories. “I am a weak fool. I kept it for Jon, a token from his mother to lift him from a life of ignorance and anonymity.”

“You were in mourning.” she replied hoarsely, she felt a giddy buzzing in her head. Littlefinger had not lied, then. Jon was truly not her brother. To what purpose had Littlefinger felt the need to know? Was it solely for the sake of knowledge? That with it, he could hold power over her family? When did he know the truth? Was he at this very moment privy to a truth only her father knew? She felt light headed with the possibility of Littlefinger's omniscience.

“Aye, and I let sentiment rule my hand. I harbored proof to condemn Jon to execution. I hid it beneath the tomb that would one day be mine. I thought no one would ever think to look there, yet here we are, all because of a little girl chasing a flower!” Her father said.

“It would have come to light. Sooner or later. Even with your prudence people would have looked for the truth,” she hesitated, “especially if they held ill will towards you. People talk— for coin, for respite from pain. There will always be ways to uncover a truth if you are willing to find it.”

“And you think there exists those people now, who pay and cause pain for this truth that I have hidden?”

“Yes.” she watches him intently, “How many people have felt wronged by you, regardless if the wrong is baseless and contrived? How many, Father, may feel that you have wronged them through a death carried out or a conquest they felt should have been theirs instead?”

“Careful, child, that reeks strong of paranoia” Her father warned, but he was listening. She could tell that she had reached through to him with her half truths and half lies.“Better to be prepared than to have been found wanting.”

“Is this what those tutors have been teaching you?”

“My time in the… crypts have shown me that I never had a need to exercise such caution before. My education has been... quite thorough.”

“Perhaps you should sit in with Robb in his lessons.” he says, his hand stroking his beard in contemplation. He stops and turns to her, all contemplation aside. “I hope you understand this must never be spoken of. No one must know. Jon’s life— my life— is dependent on your silence.”

“And Mother? Surely, she—“

“No one!"

“I understand father.”

They did not speak about the White Walkers or the loose ends in her story, her father’s preoccupation on the paternity of Jon was enough to submerge the oddity of his daughters’ earlier questioning of the prisoner. Her father had shown his hand by revealing the cloak and ring. She had lead her father into this clumsily spun web of her own creation hoping that in so doing she could ultimately influence him enough that when that hateful day came she could steer him away from death.

He had made it so easy for her to find a thread of truth within her lies, a line of plausibility to her sudden foresight. She understood that he thought her sudden change in demeanor was brought on by the truth of who Jon’s parents truly were, that the implication that her family was harboring the potentially legitimate heir to the iron throne had caused her to be paranoid at all the possibilities. It was treason of the highest order. Friendship or not with the current king did not change the fact that if her father were to chose, it would be for Jon, in a heart beat.

This reasoning, because it stemmed from what her father already wanted to believe, was much easier to work with than the truth: that she was from some years in the future and had been transported into the body of her 13 year old self after her apparent suicide to escape a supernatural ice man.

Her father would have locked her in her chambers, she was sure.

She would keep him safe if she could not keep him from King’s Landing. She would be her father’s eyes and ears and confidant.

She only hoped she was up to task.  
\-----------------------------------

The day was upon her. They stood in line outside in greeting, Arya was jabbering away beside her, but Sansa was deaf to her voice. She was fixated on two growing black points before her. Joffrey and Cersei. She was beyond reasoning when she saw them. Her head swam with a thunderous mix of fury and terror. The only thing keeping her from rushing the horses and gutting them, was the thought she wouldn’t get very far. She may have been able to kill Joffrey if only due to the sheer surprise of attack, but ultimately it was a fools errand. She would not be foolish.

"Don’t look so murderous, sister,” Robb said in amusement, “That may one day be your husband.”  
“I would rather be poisoned.” She replied and smiled.

 

 

 


	2. chapter 2

“They say I would be a good match for the prince.” She said her face stony and drawn as her mother combed her long hair in preparation for the King and his entourage.  
“It would be a fine match.” her mother said.”You would be queen someday.”  
“Yes. It’s what I’d always dreamed of, isn’t it?” She watched her mother in the mirror, and noticed something she had not the first time around, when her head was filled with dashing golden knights and princes. In the mirror Sansa saw her mother’s brows were drawn in worry. Her face betrayed what she truly felt about the potential match between her eldest daughter and the crown prince. Was there hesitance?  
“Mother?” she said slowly, “If the king proposes a match can father refuse?”  
“Well, the king and your father are friends…it may be a delicate subject but I don’t see how refusing a match would do much harm…but Sansa, darling, I thought you would be enthusiastic to one day be marrying the prince. It would be a very favorable match.”  
“I don’t want to leave you or papa, not so soon at least, Winterfell is my home and…what if he is unkind?” she said quietly, carefully, willing her request to sound a naive girls’ bid for the comfort and safety of home and family, and not a duplicitous demand to thwart the royals at their step. What went unsaid was this: If I’m mistreated or harmed, how will you ever know? When Winterfell is so far away. It was manipulative in the worst sense. She was using her mother's love as leverage. Sansa felt dirty for doing it, but at the very least, she thought, it would buy her time to become truly undesirable to the golden haired demons. She’d make it up to her mother, somehow.  
It was a selfish desire. “I’d like…to choose for myself a suitable husband one day.”  
“You’re such a romantic, my darling!” her mother smiled,"but if you truly do not want to marry the prince, I don’t see why you should. There all done, you look lovely.”  
Sansa looked in the mirror and stood. “Thank you,Mother.”  
“Sansa,” her mother said carefully, “There isn’t any reason for the change of heart, is there? You can tell me anything, my darling. You’re soon to be a woman, I know there are certain...feelings that come at this age, you would tell me if you feel…confused?”  
“Mother, I’m not confused at all.” she replied and gave her mother a soft kiss on her brow.  
\-------------------------------  
Her father had allowed Sansa to sit in these passed weeks while Robb received lessons on everything from military strategy to economics. Since coming of age, Robb no longer sat with Sansa’s and her younger sibling’s tutor. She never payed it any mind before, she was far more interested in the more domestic and creative aspects of being a daughter of a great House. She was being trained to be the perfect spouce, not to rule. Even if her destiny was to someday be queen, it was never to rule of her own right. Why bother learning the intricacies of the rule of law if she would never be able to exercise it?  
Robb was suited to it, at any rate. He was kind and steadfast, but like her father before her, found the minutia of court tedious and unnecessary. And her father did very little to curtail it. She saw this as a mistake.  
More and more their father had taken it upon himself to teach him the finer points of being the lord of Winterfell. She had often seen them walking side by side when the confines of father’s study was no longer conducive to his lessons. Sansa wondered if her father’s sublimely melancholic look was due to the fact that he himself never had these lessons from his father. Not only because he was the younger son, but because of the untimely deaths that befell her grandfather and uncle.  
Robb had a keen mind and Sansa soon found that she was competing with her brother. It was an unfamiliar feeling, but she could tell her brother enjoyed it, even if it was strange with the newness of it. On military strategy he still outperformed her almost embarrassingly so but Sansa was able to command a certain kind of persuasive power when it came to matters of court and council that outmaneuvered her brother’s practical but impatient manner.  
It quickly became Sansa’s most precious of moments. Her father’s proud face, his steady, patient voice as he gently guided them.  
It was a counterpoint to Baelish’s methods. Where he sought to manipulate and deceive, her father sought for justice and compromise. Baelish was a product of his environment: a cruel man willing to do anything to achieve his means. She prayed a thousand times, a million, that she could forget everything from that other place. That her father’s lessons were the only lesson’s to guide her. But Littlefinger’s words still crawled across her psyche. A sickening means to a sickening end. If she didn’t think about it, it would make it less real, less true. Like a child who hides under the blankets from the monster at the foot of the bed. As if that were any real safety. The safety of this new world, this time, was an illusion and she had to make a very conscious effort to not let herself be blunted by it.  
“Sansa.” her father said after he had excused them from his study, “Sit, I’d like to speak with you.”  
Sansa sat, her face only showing mild curiosity.  
“I’m so very proud of you.” he said without preamble. Her father was not one to sentimentality but he had always been kind.  
Sansa smiled sadly at him, “Thank you, papa. This time I’ve spent with you and Robb...you’ll never know what it truly means to me.”  
“I wish...” her father stood, and walked towards the fireplace, pensive and far away, “One day you will marry, and your husband will be a kind man, but I wish…there was more that I could give you. Were I able to change how the world sees women. The way it seeks to snuff out the purest lights. Perhaps then Lyanna might still live, maybe she would not have been so restless. I look at Aria and you and think…how can I hide that brightness?  
He looks at her and there is a great sadness in his eyes, sadness and fear. “I have done you a great disservice.”  
“No, papa. Never!”  
“I’ve kept you hidden. I willed your mother to teach you and your sister only the most basic of things. When Aria strayed, I persisted. Looked to you as my shining example as the right and true way. You never rebelled or cried, you were my perfect daughter. I mistook obeisance for perfection and proof that I, and my fathers before me, were right, never realizing your true potential. I have hidden and dwarfed that light! I should have taught you to rule! To stand by your brothers’ side as equals.”  
“You have nothing to be regretful for. You tried..you are trying your best. Never think I’ve thought less of you for something you did or did not teach me. You can never know what it means to just be here…in this moment.”  
She stands at his side and peers up into his face, "What has you so upset?”  
“Your mother has told me you do not wish to marry the Baratheon boy. It reminded me of Lyanna. It was something you said: that I was grieving. That I’ve hidden us away here in the north.” he said.  
“I was careless. I said things out of desperation. The truth about who Jon is, what it means to the kingdom…its frightening, father.”  
“You don’t need to worry, my darling. Our silence has bought us safety.”  
“I believe you father, I do, but I also know that there are people in the world that covet that throne and will do anything in their power to attain it. Our silence has bought us our safety, but for how long? I worry that we are divided when our House should stand as one.” she replied.  
“Your mother has already spoken to me about this…at great length.” he said.  
She shakes her head,“I don’t mean whether or not you will answer the King’s call. I mean about telling mother the truth.”  
“She will hate me. She will see it as a betrayal either way.” He turns away from her, pensive once more.  
“We will soon be separated. It's best there are no lies between us when we are. Mother deserves the truth. We must be united. Mother’s feelings towards Jon are a weakness our House cannot allow to stand.” she said.  
He looks at her askance, “Whom is teaching whom, lass?”  
He sat back in his chair and looked at her patiently, “Sansa, your mother—she’s a complicated woman. She’s fiercely loyal. Loyal to you and your brothers and sister. She’d do anything to keep you safe, to see you succeed."  
“What are you saying father? Are you—are you saying that you don’t trust mother?"  
"Gods know I love the woman, but if she could, she’d raze the world to the ground if it meant protecting you. If it meant giving Jon up to keep you safe or to give Robb leverage...”  
“You’re speculating, you don’t know this for sure. Why leave it to chance and be blindsided? How do you think she’d react then? And what of Jon? Does he not deserve the truth?  
“I made this choice a long time ago—“  
“If you never had any intention of revealing the truth, why keep the cloak and ring?”  
\-----------------------  
The grand dining hall, where her parents were at this very moment entertaining the bane of her existence along with the loyal Lords and Ladies of their vassal houses. Everywhere was alight with wine drinking, merry making, murmurs of "its the highlight of the year!"  
Sansa would have preferred to be fucked by a White Walker.  
Robb spit out whatever it was he had been drinking, his face red in absolute astonishment. Sansa looked back at him, had she said that aloud?  
“I feel its time for me to retire.” Sansa said and made her way out of the banquet hall. The faces of these feckless, disloyal, treasonous lords and ladies circling her like vultures. The Lannisters were in good company!  
Her mother watched her go a worried expression on her face.  
She could hear voices in the courtyard. Sansa stopped mid step. Tyrion! And…Jon? They were speaking too quietly for her to hear. The meeting was short, for in a moment Tyrion passed her, she hid behind the wall, but he was far too into his flask to pay her any mind had he recognized her at all.  
She knew she was avoiding them, the Lannisters. She sat by the wall that hid her from the courtyard's view. She held her father’s confidence by the thinnest of threads. Even now things were unfolding without her knowledge. How much of what was happening right now between her father and the king, her father and mother, him and the Lannisters, were slowly paving the way towards his execution. She couldn’t just go up to her father and demand all his secrets, what would that accomplish? He’d tuck her right into bed and tell her not to worry her sweet little head. And now without the prospect of marriage to Joffrey, would she even be allowed to travel to King’s Landing with her father? She was foolish in speaking, but the opportunity was too much to pass up. She knew her mother found it a complicated match! She saw the calculation, the weight of pro and con in her mother's face and she had been too weak to hold her tongue. What if her parent’s had no reason to allow her to travel now? How was she ever going to save her father when she kept making these useless blunders? Or worse, what if she wasn’t changing things enough? What if her time here was wasted and she was forced to watch it all unfold again…if she was forced to…!  
Sansa took a deep breath. Here be dragon’s, she thought. She shouldn’t let herself be trapped by the what if’s. It would surely lead her to madness.  
She couldn’t misspeak, or draw attention to herself in any way that would make people wary of her presence. But she needed information. She had no spies, like Littlefinger, or coin like the Lannisters. She wasn’t small either, like Arya and Bran who were able to flit to an fro almost undetected among the tall lumbering adults.  
“I may be doomed to failure…again,” She sighed and rubbed her face in an unladylike gesture.  
“Sansa?”  
“Jon. Why aren’t you…at the party.” She finished lamely, realizing as she spoke that her mother would have never allowed him. It would be…improper. “I’m sorry.”  
“No harm done.” he replied and nervously scratched the back of his head.  
“Oh,” She said pleasantly surprised, “You’ve cut your hair!”  
“And shaved,” he replied and lifted his eyebrows. He seemed so…well, if not carefree, certainly more at ease than she had ever known him to be. She wished she had cherished him in this time.  
“Well, we mustn’t let it go to waste!” she smiled at him even though he was very embarrassed, because of it, perhaps. She took his hand in hers and lead him to the kitchens, an idea forming in her head.  
“Where are we going?”  
“To confiscate some food. We’re going to have our own celebration,” she replied.  
“What are we celebrating?”  
“The pursuit of Knowledge."  
————————  
They left the pantry with their goods wrapped in her skirt. She could tell that he was still embarrassed, but he was hungry too, and her mood was too infectious to deny. They made their way behind the stables and spread their bounty. She sat beside him and handed him a tart.  
“They served these to the king.” she told him, “Cook said they were made from the first pick of the wild berries this season.”  
She watched him take a bite.  
“It’s good.”He said.  
“Jon?”  
“Yes?”  
“I saw you and Robb try to teach Bran the bow…Could you teach me?” He was not very good, her Bran. But that brought a certain comfort. Of her siblings, Bran and she had always been the most alike. They both shared the same temperament, and they both had an eerie fascination with birds. She dreamt she was one often, it was the subject of most of her embroidery. She’d often seen him lost in thought watching the birds mid flight. She suspected it was why he liked to climb so high.  
“You want to learn to shoot a bow?”  
“Not exactly…I’d like to learn to,” She made a gesture with her hands, “Be less conspicuous.”  
“I’m pretty sure that is not possible.”  
“You taught Aria!”  
“She stalked me! And she’s different!”  
“How so?”  
“You’re…Taller.” He blushed.  
“I don’t see a difference if you can teach one sister to sneak, surely its no difference for the other!”  
“We’re not spies, Sansa, and I did no such thing.” he said, his expression bordering on polite derision, "Father instructed me in the sword as counterpoint for Robb, and Uncle Benjen taught me how to hunt, but “sneaking” as you put it is not something future Queens should worry about.”  
She dropped the subject at his admission, she could see he thought her request ridiculous. She was not that far in thinking it herself. To her dismay, it seemed that news of her possible nuptials to the little beast had already spread. She was woefully ill equipped to play puppeteer, especially when she was up against the best. In the confines of Winterfell it was of little consequence how well she was able to get the servant’s to scatter with just a look. But in the grand scheme of things? Was she even going to be able to wield something of such scope as saving an entire House? At this moment was Littlefinger moving pieces she wouldn’t see until too late? Not to mention Cersei. A devil much closer to home. Sansa played a risky game, at some point the dice aren't going to roll the way she wants them to. She may have convinced her father she wasn’t just a pretty flower to be admired, but perhaps something like a confidant. But was that enough? Not nearly.  
“Is this query your attempt at friendship?” his soft voice brings her out of her own head, he’s looking at her intently the shadows dancing across his face.  
“I worry about father.” she begins, carefully avoiding the question. “The King has come to bestow upon him the honor of being Hand to the King. Reason would therefore stand that Robb would serve as Winterfell’s Lord until he returns. Mother would stay at Robb’s side as his council. That leaves father alone in a viper’s nest.”  
“You have a very heightened sense of distrust of the royal family.”  
“In the short time that I’ve known them, they have given reason for distrust.”  
“So given your poor esteem of King’s Landing and its inhabitants, you’ve decided to take it upon yourself to be father’s…?”  
“If the the King has a Hand, why shouldn’t ours?”  
“You want to be father’s Hand?”  
“Robb must rule, Bran and Rickon are too young…and where do you stand?” Instantly she knows she said the wrong thing. She meant it as a query into his decision to join the Night’s Watch. Was it a wise choice, she wondered, when history has shown the splitting of the Starks to never end well. It slipped out of her untrained and misshapen.  
“Of course. I have no standing.” He said flatly and stared with determination at the side of the stables. A hard angry line forming on his brow.  
“That is not what I meant. Why must you always put words in my mouth!” she recoiled, hid behind her red hair. She wants to shake him. How can he frustrate her so! How can she love him so but still make her feel like she could strangle him!  
“You have always reminded me of my place!”  
“I was a stupid child! Favouring a mother’s longing to protect her family from what she perceived as outsiders! You always had father and Bran and Robb and Aria, but mother only ever had me! I was foolish and naive and willfully ignorant but that is no longer the person I wish to be! If I could, I would fix it! I would…I would...”  
She takes his hand in both of hers in search of the words that escape her. In their anger, they are now both standing inches from each other, food and the previous air of camaraderie forgotten. She can see him breathing heavily with some unspoken emotion. A remnant from a childhood spent in rejection. To anyone watching they might even mistake their positions as romantic, when it was anything but. There was a terrible sadness in her heart, to realize that this Jon in front of her, may never forgive her for her pettiness, when longing and distance where not bedfellows to sooth an old hurt.  
“I’m so sorry,"She kisses the broken skin on his knuckles. It’s cold and dry in the castle, though winter is yet to come, and his hands are rough from training. He will never understand what he means to her. What it was like to see him once more at Castle Black, to dream and wish and hope in the freezing snow. For nothing else but him. “I hope you can one day forgive me, but even if you don’t. Or can’t. I love you. And always will.”  
She leaves him in the cold night, I will not cry, she thinks to herself.  
“Sansa,” she hears him call her name. There's a strange quality to his voice, “I can teach you how to wield a knife, if you’re still interested.”  
——————  
“Ouch!”  
“You can’t just whirl your arm out like a broken windmill!  
“Well, then stand still!”  
“You’re hopeless!”  
“That says more about the teacher than the student!”  
"Fine!"  
"Fine!”  
Their lessons were short lived. Sansa really was her brother’s sister. She felt real, unapologetic, sympathy for Bran.  
—————————  
Bran is to fall from the tower soon. It is a day, like few others that will live on in her memory as the first harbinger of ill tidings for the Starks. She should have realized it for what it was then. It was the first real shock of how cruel the world truly was. She had become an adept at navigating through cruelty.  
But cruelty and hindsight or not, at the moment, she needs to think of a way to steal a cart-full of hay. Lots, and lots of hay. Its the only thing she can think of that may work. She doesn’t remember exactly the time of his fall. She doesn’t trust that he will not climb up that tower when he had been warned so many times before. She contemplated tying him up. Too many questions and the chance that someone would set him free posed too high a risk. A potion for sleep, perhaps? But she couldn’t keep him asleep indefinitely. What would happen when he awoke? He would climb and sooner or later he would fall.  
She thought about pushing him. A small push or ambush to teach him a lesson. To scare him, without causing any real harm. He would hate her forever if he found out, but he’d be safe. Whole. The closer she got to the day, the more she thought about it. It scared her that she could think such a thing, that she would even entertain it. So, the hay. If he had to fall, if history must repeat itself, then it would be on her terms.  
This is her first real test. If she can change this, perhaps there is hope for them after all.  
Cart-fulls of hay were periodically filled from the fields and brought to the stables where the hay was sorted for livestock use or for castle use as bedding and other domestic needs. She had watched them for days, memorizing the routine to confiscate the thing before the stable boys returned.  
“She’s pretty enough, you should spend time with her.” The queen’s voice can be heard behind her.  
“But mother! She’s a lunatic! Spends all her time praying to that pathetic tree god theirs.”  
Oh! lords and ladies she was not ready for this. But it was too late Cersei and Joffrey were crossing the courtyard and in a moment would see her.  
“Your Grace, Prince Joffrey,” she said stiffly, her head bent down in a perfect curtsy of deference.  
She wanted the earth to swallow her whole. Joffrey was not the worst of her tormentors but he had the distinction of being the first. She was frozen in place. Her childhood tormentor parading in from of her with no thought of how sincerely she had prayed for his death. In King’s Landing she remembered the feeling of petrification, of being unable to speak or even breath for fear that at any moment she would be dead. The humiliation of being beaten was nothing compared to the fear or the darker, quieter voice in her head that whispered of defeat. Let them beat you, or slander your name, let them do as they please. Soon he will bore and you will have your rest. The little voice, that sickening, dull stupid voice! The things she was willing to tolerate to keep her head on her shoulders! She wanted to rage, scream, beat their faces until they were bloody, but all she can do now is stand here with a docile bend in her neck. Where was the woman that set dogs to her husband's face and watched as they devoured him bit by bit?  
Had she not come with her? Had she been lost, too?  
A colorful, knotted rag flew between the Lannisters and Sansa and not far behind it, Shaggydog. The dire wolf grabbed the toy with his teeth and ran off like a pup half his size in search of Rickon, no doubt.  
“Apologies, your grace,” Robb smiled good naturedly as he walked up to them, “My brother’s aim is not something to be admired.”  
Sansa turned and could see Jon looking sheepish and annoyed. Sansa felt light headed, she took a step towards him, the breath she had been holding escaped out of her in one long exhalation. Jon.  
“Please do try to be more careful, Robb. You’ll ruin the Queen's beautiful slippers.” Sansa said in the next moment catching her breath and smiling prettily.  
“Well,"Cersei replied with a poor attempt at hiding a sneer when she saw Jon,"much can’t be expected from such a place, come along my darling.” She watched Sansa’s face closely, and hooked her arm with her son’s, strolling on as if the Starks in front of her suddenly never existed.  
“Come now, Sansa surely you can look a little more lively for your future Queen in law?” Robb quipped once they were gone.  
“Robb, my dearest and most darling brother if you wish to ever be able to sire children you will cease and desist that line of thought.”  
Robb lifted his eyebrows high onto his forehead and looked at Jon,“Oi! I think she’s getting cold feet!”  
Shaggydog ran back up to them, rag toy forgotten, lifted one leg unceremoniously and peed on Robb's foot. Robb yelled at the supremely uninterested dog.  
“Who has cold feet now!” Jon replied.  
\----  
She finds something one day. A book, forgotten in the ancient shelves of Maester Luwin’s study. A song about the children and the first men written on the last page of an old tome, as if an afterthought. A greenseers song about using blood to bring the weirwoods alive.  
Old Nan had told Bran stories about the greenseers and wargs. These beings were often Children, they held among their rank this ancient power. How it came to be seen in man as the songs implied was something Sansa wondered. Perhaps the first men were closer to the Children than their peace treaties suggested. Perhaps every once in a generation the line breeds true and one man in a hundred thousand became wargs, who were able to see through the eyes of animals, and one in a thousand wargs could be greenseers able to do ancient magic. Turning trees into warriors. Being able to see into the past and future. Maester Luwin doubted the feats of the green seers. No one had the power of over time, if that were the case, the Children would be the unquestionable victors over Man. Yet here we are, he’d said, the Children are nothing but fables and Man rules from here to the islands of The Arbor and beyond.

Sansa sat at the base of the heart tree, looking up at the twisted carved face of the trunk. Trying to fit the pieces together. The Starks are descendant of the First men. Bran the builder had weaved magic into the very stones of Winterfell, but how much was truth and how much was storytelling? And where did she fit in all this, how could she use this knowledge to keep them alive?  
“What secrets do you hold?” she rubbed the spot where she had stabbed herself. Magic and blood.  
She undid the pin that held her hair in place and pricked her finger until a large bead of blood collected at the tip. She put her bloody hand on the ancient face. “Please help me understand what I’ve done. Let me not make the same mistakes.”  
But the old tree just stared at her hollowly, if there was magic she had possessed it was now spent.  
————————  
She had a terrible dream. She was back in Ramsey’s room, his body crushing hers. She woke up and thought she saw eerie bright green eyes at the foot of her bed. She sat up and ran in a blind panic until she was in the Godswood. Exhaustion and terror warring for her attention.  
It was early morning and the castle was just waking from slumber. She sat, watching the leaves littering the ground as they fell until there was a carpet of red. It looked like the tree was bleeding. Ramsey's eyes had been green, she thought.  
She didn’t know how long she sat there for, lost in thought and memory.  
She wants to forget everything. The magic of Winterfell, the Night's King, Ramsey Bolton. None of it ever happened, she whispered. She prayed it to be so. She just wants to be a girl again.  
“Sansa? Are you..are you alright?” Jon looks at her worriedly as he shifts from foot to foot. Unsure, uncertain. She catalogues his tells. he’s worried about her, she notes, and thinks she like that a little too much.  
“Jon! I’m fine,” she assures him wiping her tears away, hiding behind a curtain of hair.  
“You’re crying. What 'never happened'?”  
“It’s nothing,”  
“I know we haven’t always gotten along but you can tell me if you—if you're in any kind of trouble.” he handed her a kerchief to wipe her tears, the sigil of the dire wolf on one corner,“Its-it’s my duty to protect you.”  
She didn’t know what it was: the way he said the words softly, his kindness, the promise he’d made, the handkerchief. That he’d never let harm come to her. He didn’t even like her, not really.  
She exhaled, a sound between a scoff and a sob and flung her arms around his neck. She kissed him. Her lips pressed tightly against the skin of his cheek. It was meant to be a sisterly kiss, a sweet thing to express to him her unabashed adoration. For she did, she adored him. Unquestionably. Maddeningly. She kissed him again, a quick soft press on his lips. She looked at him, surprise mirroring in their faces.  
"Get away from her!”  
“Mother!” awe and shame caught her unawares and she and Jon both sprang apart. Her mother was coming towards them. Fury was displayed on Lady Catelyn’s face for all the world to see.  
"I took you in, and this is how you repay me? By seducing my daughter?!” her mother grabbed Sansa and pulled her behind her, a physical barrier between Sansa and Jon. There was a wild eyed look of utter confusion on Jon’s face, his hands up in supplication, almost.  
“I-I-I it’s not what you think, I’d never hurt Sansa!” Jon stuttered, tripping over an uneasy apology.  
“You are a vile creature! A bastard, sick with a bastards base lust!” her mother fumed.  
“No! Mother, you’re wrong it’s not what you think!” Sansa pleaded trying in vain to keep her voice level.  
“Leave us! Go now!” her mother raged, gesturing for Sansa to return to her chambers.  
“Please, mother. Let me explain, this is all my fault.” she entreated.  
Sansa’s mother took one step towards her, a terrible frightening look on her face. She struck Sansa soundly across the face.  
Sansa raised her hand to her cheek. Tears springing to her eyes, not due to any physical pain but to shock and disappointment. Her mother had never struck her.  
“I’m sorry, Mother.” she said her voice steady and unfeeling, “But you’re making a terrible mistake.”  
Sansa turns and leaves.  
\--  
Sansa waits in her chambers, she’s sitting stock still at the small round table by the fire but her insides are all but vibrating with an unmet need to do something. She should go back there and stand her ground with her mother. Explain this was all a terrible misunderstanding. That she was tired and sad and unsure and that Jon was this shining light. Respite, from a bleak future.  
A tear slipped down her cheek. How to explain away her sadness? How to have her mother understand what she was feeling without letting her know the truth of what she had been through. Sansa was at odds; she wanted her mother to know everything, she knew her mother would not believe her.  
Especially not now, when she had seen…her kiss.  
She kissed him! It had been unthinking and honey sweet. In that moment she had seen how things could have truly gone. Her family whole and happy together. Jon’s lovely concern for her well being. It was like something out of her childhood songs. She thought that sort of thing had never existed, and she wept with joy at the knowledge that the world could still have moments so sweet.  
She hears her mother come in.  
“It’s done,” Lady Catelyn says without preamble. “What ever moment of fancy you had, is done now. You will not see that boy again.”  
“Mother, please sit,” she says, though the questions are nearly bursting from her, what do you mean its done? Where is Jon?What did you do? “I know I’ve been…difficult-different of late. Please let me explain. But before I do, where is Jon? Please tell me you haven’t done anything impulsive. He really has nothing to do with any of this."  
Her mother looked at her, saw the pink hand print on Sansa’s cheek. Maybe she felt regret for that or perhaps it was Sansa’s calm quiet look, but her mother took a seat across her.  
“It’s been months, Sansa. When he found you in those crypts I thought nothing of it. I was grateful, in fact, that he found you and brought you back to me. But you were withdrawn and distant after. It was something the Queen had said in passing, and I could not make sense of it until now. But this…this cannot stand.”  
“No, mama,” She shook her head, “Do you think Jon’s hurt me? That he seduced me?”  
“What else could there be?” Lady Catelyn said disassembling before her. Sansa stood and went to kneel at her mother’s feet. She looked up at her imploringly. She had been outmaneuvered by Cersei. There was a boiling anger inside her, not so much at Cersei. She had expected something some repurcussion at her snuff of Joffrey, just not this. She had hoped that by staying out of their way, she could pass unknowingly. Leave it to her twisted mind to come up with something like this. A guilty conscious was the most telling of all.  
She was most angry with herself. That she had let herself be so obvious with her affections, as innocent as they were.  
“Jon's never even entertained the thought. I don’t know how he found me, he must have heard me crying. I don’t even know how I dared to go so far down there. I only meant to go a little bit away, but I slipped and hit my head. When I awoke it was too dark my candle had gone out and I was afraid to move. Old Nan had told us an old story of a Dragon living in the crypts. And its silly, but I was afraid. And then Jon came and lead me out. I was trying to thank him. It was poorly done. But Jon has never hurt me, mother. Has never done anything to compromise my integrity. If there is one thing to trust in this inconstant world is that Jon would die for me. For us. Never doubt this.”  
“Then why? Why are you so sad!” her mother asked in desperation. “You’re different, it’s not just that you're growing older. I can feel it, Sansa. Something is hurting you and I can’t…I can’t protect you from it!”  
“Where is he? Where’s Jon?” she asked, tears streaming down her face. Her mother’s anguish was something she had not anticipated. She realized this wasn’t so much about a little kiss as it was about Sansa herself. She didn’t think her mother would notice her pain. The only time she let it show plainly on her face was with her father, when she convinced him to let her speak with the deserter. Her anguish was only ever obvious when she could use it. This was a lesson Littlefinger did not have to teach. Perhaps she should have payed better attention. After all, Lady Catelyn lived for her children and she knew something was amiss.  
“He’s gone. I ordered him to leave within the hour,” her mother said, “To the Wall and Watch.”  
Sansa took her mother’s hands in hers and kissed them, not unlike she had done to Jon, she sighed and filled her voice with as much sincerity as she could, “I am sad, mother. But not because anyone has hurt me. If I have worried you, it was never my intention. My sadness is because of the secrets I keep. But..they are not my secrets. They are Father’s."  
————  
Sansa runs to the stables but he’s already gone. Sansa wishes she could tell him…she doesn’t really know: that she’s proud. That she waits for his return. That she’s sorry she’s not sorry for the kiss.

———————————  
She was too late. After all her careful planning, the days spent watching the coming and going of the stable, she was late because she thought she saw green eyes at her window!  
She was a silly girl! Fretting and jumping at her shadow because Jon was no longer by her side. Banished to the Night’s Watch by her mother in a fit of rage. No one knew the true reason why he’d gone so abruptly yesterday. Lady Catelyn had squashed any rumors that sprang from his departure like a bug. Her mother was acting if nothing at all had ever transpired between them. Sansa doubted her mother had demanded the truth from her father yet, though she doubted that would last long. According to the house Jon had gone because it was his ambition to do so, that the schedule to his departure had advanced was unremarkable. Lord Tyrion voiced dismay at being unable to join him on his travel as he had hoped to see the wall for himself, but Lady Catelyn graciously arranged a retinue to accompany him at his leisure. Her siblings were devastated. Jon had left a quickly penned note saying he would miss them and not to worry. Sansa had not been mentioned.  
The stable boys were busily unloading the cart.  
“Jonah Abbey,” she barked, she had no longer any patience for stealth or anonymity. The boy turned and Sansa watched as a queer expression flit across his face.  
“L-lady Sansa!”  
“I heard your aunt looking for you in the kitchens.”  
“M’lady?”  
“Go! You witless boy!” Sansa watched as he and his cousin both scrambled to the kitchens both terrified and perplexed, no doubt. Sansa recognized the look the cook's nephew gave her. It was fear. Sansa frowned, things were developing nicely, if one was willing to overlook what happened with her mother. Her pathway to the cart was clear, but the supernatural rumors surrounding her behavior were becoming worrisome. She took a breath and tried lifting the haystack back up into the cart. All that mattered now was Bran.  
“You”, says a familiar voice behind her,” are not one of the servant girls.”  
“Lord Tyrion!” Lannister’s! Would no one rid me of these troublesome Lannister’s!  
“Lady Sansa, is it? What brings the eldest daughter of Lord Stark to such…exertion?” he seemed pleased she knew his name and tittle.  
She smiled beatifically at him, “Lord Tyrion, ladies of the North pride themselves in being able to…perform any number of domestic tasks.” she said, "Winter is coming and the weak do not live long if they are not hardy.”  
“And lugging hay about like a common stablehand…?”  
“Promotes stamina.”  
“Well, I would never get in the way of a lady’s desire for stamina.” he said lifting his eyebrows high, “I’ll leave you to it.”  
“Lord Tyrion?”  
“Yes?”  
“It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance. I hope you are not a stranger in the House of my father.”  
“Likewise, my lady.” he said at the odd turn of phrase and bowed politely. She watched him until he disappeared from sight, no doubt in search of the next bottom of a bottle.  
She lead the horse and cart towards the tower. It was already past midday. From below she could see the window that Bran’s body was found sprawled beneath, in her time. No one knew how long her little brother had lay there at the base, unconscious and cold. She sent a quick prayer up to the heavens, and broke the axle to the cart with a few good whacks of an ax. She was getting rather good at this physical labor stuff, Jon’s dissasterous lessons not withstanding. Please let this work, she thought.  
Positioned beneath the window she hoped the hay would break Bran’s fall. She chased the horse off. Someone will find it in the field and will think it spooked and ran off with the cart until it broke down and horse and cart separated. Hopefully, Tyrion would forget his encounter at the stables, the man had been hungover as it was. This was all just happenstance. A lucky coincidence.  
She hides beneath the shrubbery at the base of the tower. It was easy to stay hidden, much of this part of the grounds were overrun by greenery. This tower had long been under only the most basic of care within the castle grounds.  
She doesn’t know how long she has to wait. She had intended on going back to the castle to wait out the inevitable. Await the news of his fall, a mirror of what had occurred in her timeline, but she realized she couldn’t leave her brother. Not when she still had him here, not when they were all together like this. She must have drifted off to sleep at some point.  
She hears a scream and a body falls into the hay. Sansa runs to the cart, her limbs still heavy with sleep, scrambling up to find her brother, but all she sees is hay and a streak of blood. She finds him unconscious but still breathing. She yells for help, but the sound is drowned out from her panic. Theres blood all over her hands and skirt. She sees Bran's pale, beautiful face covered in blood and something inside her snaps. She get’s down from the cart searching for help, yelling unintelligibly, unsure as to wether she can leave him. He’s dead, she thinks irrationally. This didn’t work, I’ve changed things and now he’s dead because I failed.  
She turns and sees Jamie Lannister emerge from the tower.  
Oh.  
The air leaves her in sudden deadly realization. She feels…a strange quiet calm. Then the sound of a deep low growl from within. She holds her breath and her teeth, long and sharp, are deep within the flesh of this beast that has hurt her brother. Her body is all corded muscle, and her paws feel strong and certain beneath her.  
Sansa snaps to.  
Lady has the knight in her teeth, tearing off his hand like a rag doll's appendage.  
Cersei is screaming something.  
She hears people running from the castle towards them. But it all seems very far away. They’re seconds away from aid. Sansa just watches Cersei and Jamie Lannister. Her hair is disheveled. His right hand is gone.  
And Sansa has just become a player.  
———————————————  
She didn’t say a word. At this very moment her mother was tending to her brother, he was still unconscious but nothing seemed to be broken, or so the maester said. A very lucky little boy, he said. He must have struck his head against the stone of the tower as he fell or upon impact with the hay. Head wounds were always bloody, but the cut was superficial. It looked much worse than it was. Than it could have been.  
The Lannister’s were being cared for by their own maester. Cersei had already asked for Lady’s head.  
It would only be a matter of time before the Queen would ask to speak with her. Her father had asked her what had happened. Sansa sat with her spine pin straight. There was still blood on her hands and dress.  
She told them a version of the truth. That she saw Bran fall during a stroll through the grounds. In the confusion and fear that her master was feeling, Lady had thought Jamie Lannister had caused her harm and she attacked him.  
“She was only trying to protect me. The blood must have scared her.”  
Her father sent her to wash up, get some rest. That had been an hour ago. The maids had come and gone, staying as far away from her as they could, but she payed them no mind.  
She now had a playing hand. She held the Queen in her grasp. She knew the truth about what was going on in that tower. Why Bran had fallen. She had either become a player or doomed them all.  
Could she do this? Could she sacrifice Lady. Her beautiful, brave girl?  
Please she begged, please don’t make me do this. How could she not have realized it would be a trade? She couldn’t keep her brother and Lady both. The universe was rarely so giving. Every time she tried to change something it pushed back, as if trying to right itself on its track. She’d tried to change her relationship with Jon only to have had him be sent away to the Watch earlier than planned. She’d tried to save Bran from his fall only to have the Knight mauled by Lady, condemning her to death once again.  
Could she really change anything?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi! Thanks to everyone who's reviewed. You'll have to bare with me, because i don't really know where this story is going only that I wished there was more magic (lol dragons and ice zombies galore but where are all my spellcaster homies?) and Sansa had a more fleshed out spine. Aria and Jon and Bran are all super badass but poor Sansa is only hinted at being good at "playing the game". I want her to be more adventurous?  
> I'm not making her a greenseer or anything, thats bran, but I definitely want her to be aware of the magic that may flow through the Starks. I'm taking alot of creative license because I'm mostly working off of memory from the books and show. If you see any inconsistencies it's because i've just forgotten and didn't doublecheck.   
> Regarding Bran's fall: someone actually looked into how Assassin's Creed (the game) assassin could just swan dive into a cart of hay and walk off like nothing. Apparently, if its more than 41 feet, its not happening (assuming average 1.5-meter haystack height). "The article concluded that the maximum height from which a person could actually fall into a haystack safely is around 12.5 meters or 41 feet (around 3.8 stories). The maximum survivable fall height, the paper found, was around 50 meters or 164 feet (around 15 stories), though dropping from this height would cause "serious injury." I don't know if GRRM ever did the math. I'm assuming that window Bran fell out of was 41 feet.  
> Also please please no show spoilers for the new season 7. I havent seen them yet, because I want to wait to binge them all at once when I have time. Thank you all!


	3. chapter 3

Her brother looks little and pale engulfed by the white linens of the bed. Her mother is by his side, ever vigilant for even a suggestion of consciousness, but her brother slept on unaware of kith and kin.  
“Mother,” Sansa says, “how is he?”  
“He sleeps yet. The Maester has no remedy for it. There’s no reason why he should sleep on, yet there he lies. The longer he lingers the greater my worry grows!”  
“Oh, Mother, though it may seem impossible, please, don’t fret.” Sansa assured, "You remember how long it took me to awaken from my stupor, perhaps Bran is as hard headed as I.” Sansa joins her beside her brother’s bed and places her cool hand on her mother’s.  
“Yes, my darling. My little sleeping beauties!” her mother says looking at Brans still face, worry creasing her forehead but the shadow that veiled her eyes was lifted at Sansa’s suggestion, if only for a moment. Catelyn turns and looks at Sansa, her hand moving from beneath hers and coming up to touch briefly Sansa’s cheek.  
“Yet, when you awoke...I’m sorry.”She whispers, Sansa leans in to the touch unsure, “I have, for as long as you have lived, never raised my hand at my children. The other day…I deeply regret what happened.”  
Sansa’s hand trembled as she smoothed her brother’s bedsheets, in an unhelpful, unnecessary gesture, “You’ve spoken with father, then?”  
Her mother said nothing, but Sansa could see the truth of it.  
“You’re exhausted, I’ll stay with him while you get some rest,” Sansa offers, tears gathering in her eyes, “I’ll come for you when he wakes."  
Her mother smiled wanly and closed the door behind her as she left. Sansa kneeled by her brother's bed, supplicant. She gathered his smaller hand in both of hers,  
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”  
As if repeating the words would somehow make them truer.  
\-----------  
Like clockwork, Sansa receives an invitation for tea with the Queen later that morning. The king and his retinue are set to leave in less than a fortnight. Sansa has yet to convince her father to refuse the King’s offer, Lysa Arryn’s letter being the culprit thereof.

Sansa enters the queen’s chambers. Cersei is sitting at her tea table, a bored unreadable look on her face. The queen is wearing an orange gown and the reflection of it on the straw gold color of her hair makes her look like she’s on fire. Once upon a time she tried to emulate the woman. She’d taken to wearing her colors, the golds and reds. The lace and delicate pearls and stitching. She’d spend hours embroidering with gold thread; a tapestry of what she hoped for her future. She now sits before the queen, in black dress, the subtle stitching of the wolf heads at her neck. Black on black. She was in mourning for everything she’d lost at the hands of this golden Queen and her son.  
She sits across from her and neither pay the maid any mind as she pours the tea into two delicate porcelain cups. There’s gold filigree on the rims and elegant handles. The queen has brought her own set.

In another life this would have been intimidating. Sansa would be a flutter. Thinking to impress, thinking of the beauty of the moment, the queen’s, her own. Now she is just tired. Her brother lies in his tower in a dreamless sleep of which he is yet to awaken. The only man she trusted banished to his knighthood far and away. The dull, relentless fear of undeniable destiny. That in a deep down part of her she knew all her endeavors were pointless, entropy was unavoidable and the universe was filled with callous, casual destruction.  
“They say you’ve been unwell.” The queen takes a small delicate sip from her cup, “Taken to walking the grounds of the castle. The maids say you’ve been possessed.”  
“I have my interests, your grace."She knows this rhythm, the parry and riposte. She measures her rhythms now, keeps the cadence even. Nonchalant. like this is a common occurrence. She looks away from Cersei and watches the handmaiden add a log to the fire to warm an already uncomfortably hot room. Cersei follows her line of sight.  
“Leave us.” She says and gives Sansa a smile that does nothing to reassure.  
“Your brother, has he awoken?”  
“Which one, your grace, I have three.”  
“Don’t play games with me, child,” the queen warned, voice low and soft and always hovering on the side of condescension. It’s a tone that Sansa had always envied. The slow measured length of her words; this Cersei was a shark in the waters waiting for the drop of blood. Sansa had a chance to watch this woman at her prime, before the deaths of her children completely unraveled her. This Cersei believes herself cunning and secure. Sansa would have never attempted this with the Cersei of her time. She was as different from her future self as Sansa was to the thirteen year old of days past.  
“Very well, your grace,” Sansa says. “I didn’t come here to be coy, or play word games. I’ve come to bargain.”  
“Bargain. Oh, my. What for? The life of that beastly mutt?” The queen scoffs, dismissive, “There’s nothing in this world that interests me less.”  
“But you are interested, your grace. It’s why you’ve called me here today; to know what it is I do or do not know.”  
She slides an envelope with the seal of House Stark towards the queen's impeccably manicured hands. The seal of the wolf unmistakable against the tan parchment, her own personal seal made meticulously to mimic the one that brought her the Vale. She stood and retrieved a candle and placed both in front of Cersei and motioned for her to open it. 

“This is a very delicate matter. At first I thought to take that letter and many, many copies and send them to my Aunt. To the Citadel. To Stannis Baratheon. I meant to ensure my own safety, your grace. My safety and that of my family. But I realised in order to do that I cannot have you as my enemy. That which you hold in your hands is the only copy. You’re free to do with it as you wish.”  
The queen folded the letter and slowly crushed it in her fist. During the time that Sansa was speaking she could see the color drain from Cersei’s face as she read, it was back now an ugly, angry shade of red, “ What’s to stop me from killing you now? What’s to stop me from accepting your offer of silence and then killing you, your brother, your dog. Anyone you hold dear.”  
“You could, but you already know the answer or you wouldn’t have asked, you’d have just done it.” Sansa poured the queen another cup of tea, but left hers untouched. “I didn’t come to threaten you. I don’t care who sits on the Iron Throne; your son, you, your brother. I don’t care who you love…or don’t or what you do with your personal time. I just want my family to be safe. Safe and away from King’s Landing. Both our brothers have already shed blood over this. Mine may never wake again, yours has lost the use of a hand. Let’s settle this between us and be done with it.”  
Cersei smoothed the letter on the table, then raised a corner to the flame. It caught instantly, she placed it on the silver tea tray and watched as the flame grew then became nothing more than ash. She imagined the author of that letter may suffer a similar fate, if she was not careful.

“You’re very clever. You never once said aloud what we were discussing. You’ve assured that the maids, or anyone passing by never heard anything. You have yet to touch your tea. Poison, you must have wondered. It’s very meticulous. No doubt you are very meticulous in other regards as well. Theres no reason to believe you would keep your word. Killing you would assure me you’d stay silent, but I could never be sure of what you’ve squirreled away. Accepting your offer gives me freedom of choice. Or so it seems.”  
“My father may still refuse the title of Hand to the king. Even if he doesn’t or I cannot persuade him, you can convince the King that in these hard times my Father should stay with his family. At least until Bran recovers…or succumbs to his wounds. The wolf is allowed to live, she will be sent to the Wall as a beast of burden. In exchange for this, you will have my silence and…aid in keeping your throne should you so desire it. I can assure that my father bends the knee to Joffrey when he becomes king.”  
She says this last part and feels some remorse, though her tone never wavers.  
She knows what she sounds like, using her brother’s injury to gain political favor. It’s something Cersei can recognize, perhaps even sympathize with. If Sansa can convince the queen that she is only doing what Cersei herself had once done, if she can get Cersei to see her young self in Sansa; inexperienced and playing at game much bigger than herself. If Cersei is convinced that Sansa is not a threat but a malleable moldable pawn to be moved across the board at her will, then she had a chance. At least enough of a chance to get them the hell out of Winterfell and away from her family. 

She had time to observe the queen while imprisoned at King’s Landing. Cersei was cruel, vain, and thought herself invulnerable in her position as queen, but she could also be incredibly candid at times. She remembered what Cersei had said about not loving a husband but loving the children that came from that union. True, her children were not her husband’s, after all if that were the case would any of this be happening? But Sansa knew enough to know that may have not always been the case. There could have been babes born of raven hair to this golden queen, babes that did not live long but still held a piece of their mother’s heart despite how hated their father’s were. Sansa herself had thought if Ramsey ever…but that was something Sansa fortunately never had to experience. His seed found no perch within her womb, a small mercy his violence brought forth. This is how she found that this Cersei was not much different from her own mother. Cersei's love resided within her own children. But that’s were the similarity ended, where her mother’s devotion also extended to her husband and, to a more strenuous extent, to her siblings, Cersei had no intention. Her relationship with her twin held no more unconditional love than a knight might have for an ancestral sword. To Cersei, apart from her children, everything else was a tool to be used for her personal gain. She could have gathered any such admissions to understand a little of what motivated this woman. 

This is what Littlefinger taught her. The Stark inside her wanted nothing more than to challenge her outright, have Lady tear out her throat in one swift move. Judge and execute this vile woman for her crimes against the rule of law and moral repugnance. But she’d seen what her father’s and brother’s brand of rash, almost impulsive justice had brought them. Cersei was able to play the game as much as Littlefinger, though she lacked his restraint. Cornered Cersei would lash out illogically and with catastrophic strength. Sansa had to be careful now not to corner her.  
Sansa inwardly winced, that she was trying to appeal to Cersei’s better nature…it had the possibility of exploding right in her face! But of all the scenarios, this one seemed like the least likely were they would all end up dead post haste. She had a list of people she had to keep from dying and at the moment herself, her dog, and her baby brother were in immediate danger of meeting a swift end. And not particularly in that order. So Sansa was going to play devil’s advocate. She had assured that her parents believed Bran’s fall had been completely accidental. Her mother no more suspected the Lannisters than she would her own daughter. 

The issue of that damning letter from her Aunt to her mother telling of Jon Arryn’s suspicious death had yet to be addressed, but she knew her father and mother would not do anything to betray their distrust of the Lannisters in regards to Jon Arryn. At least, not yet.  
“What makes you think I believe you can do any of that? You’re just a little fish that thinks its pond is too small for her. Why should I even entertain the thought? There doesn’t seem to be any benefit at all for the Starks in this…arrangement. Your father loses the opportunity for advancement at court: power, coin, and influence. Is this all to keep the Starks at Winterfell? What use is there to stay, in this ghastly cold place, surely you don’t think me such an profound idiot?"  
“My mother received a coded letter from her sister Lysa Arryn a few days ago. Someone convinced her Jon Arryn was murdered by you.” Sansa intoned rather conspiratorially, "My aunt has long been unwell, her mind’s been…touched by the gods. She feared that King Robert was trying to take her son away and send him to your father as ward. She’s convinced herself that her son will die without her at Casterly Rock, and if she didn’t write that letter the Lannisters would take her son. This is of course, non sensical, as you well know. But she was convinced, and the most likely reason in writing that letter is to pit the Starks, through my mother, and the Lannisters against each other, as the obvious choice to Arryn’s successor would be my father: their years of friendship practically assured it . Whom and why trouble with manipulating both our houses in such a way is anyone’s guess.”  
“How do you know your Aunt is wrong in assuming how Jon Arryn met his end?” Cersei was keeping her face carefully neutral and Sansa knew she was treading on very thin ground.  
“I don’t. But I didn’t think you’d be that stupid where you’d leave my Aunt as a loose end and then come here as you have knowing the possibility of communication between the Tully sisters. There’s also that of a personal matter. An…ill omen has told me that if my father goes to King’s Landing he will die. I am just trying to keep that from happening.”  
“An Omen. Prophecy, no doubt from an old witch,” the queen said non-committaly, there was an odd look on her face that Sansa could not place,“You’ve rejected negotiations for a match with the crown prince…is this more of a fear of prophesy or is it something else that keeps you here—your brother…the bastard, where is he?”  
“He’s…It’s long been his ambition to be a brother of the Night’s Watch.”  
At this Cersei’s demeanor changed completely to something Sansa did recognize: checkmate, “Oh, you are clever! When I saw you I thought you were a drab little thing, but for that head of bright red hair I thought you’d fade into the stonework. But you’ve thought this through…your mother found your paramour and banished him to the Wall. You need someone to release him of his vows. If the Lord of Wintefell’s power falls short you’d need the King, and what better way to get that pardon than to have me as an ally.”  
Cersei watched her with triumphant eyes.  
May the god’s forgive her, for she doubted Jon ever would for what she was about to do. Sansa carefully arranged a look of surprise on her face. She let her face show only a slight sense of terror, Sansa knew exactly how to play mouse to Cersei’s cat. This was about subtlety, about using the truth and weaving in alternatives until one could not distinguish one from the other. They weren’t lies outright not when there was no proof yet otherwise. Littlefinger worked magic with possibilities. This possibility gave Cersei the upper hand, but if she wasn’t careful Cersei would see right through her. She felt sick in using him this way, she was a sick means to a sick end, she said quietly, weakly,“Jon has nothing to do with this.”  
Cersei sat back in her chair a smug look of disdain flourishing across her features, “Of course he doesn’t. Your younger brother, the climber…how will you assure me of his cooperation?” she said and poured herself another cup of tea.  
“He only woke briefly, but the blow to the head and the fall…he has no memory of what happened. Even in the unlikely event he regains his memory, he’s still just a child and I can help him understand what he did or did not see. I can be very persuasive."  
"Perhaps I can see some merit in this arrangement. After all, having to kill an entire House seems…tedious. I never really enjoyed killing children. Stay in this damp, soon to be frozen hell hole, keep your mouth shut, and we have an understanding. Cross me, and I will make sure that prophesy of your father’s, extends to all the Starks.”  
Sansa stands and bows dread and anticipation pooling in her belly.  
“I hope you don’t intend on marrying the bastard,” the queen said behind her as she reaches the door, “They’d never allow it. Better to marry some pretty lordling and be content with bearing his children.”  
“That would be the smart thing to do, your grace,” Sansa replied and gave the queen a pointed look, it took all her strength not to say, how’s that working out for you?  
———  
The corridor that leads from the Queen's rooms to the rest of the castle is long and winding and Sansa has to clutch at the cold stone to keep herself upright. What had she set into motion? How much time had she bought before Cersei threw everything out the window and came after her and her kin?  
Could she really counter all of Littlefinger’s moves? How many pieces had he put into play now?  
I can’t breath, she thinks. She’s being suffocated again, the pain in her chest burns her and she feels…she feels like the night she chose to marry Ramsey thinking she made the smart choice only to find that she’d allowed herself to be sold to the lowest bidder. She had to move, had to get out of sight and into the privacy of her rooms before anyone could see her. She made her way, gasping, as the rooms closed in around her.  
“You’re a liar.”  
The voice is high, indignant, and childishly feminine and it’s like an auditory slap to the face. Sansa recoils and the movement pitches her forward towards her sister’s pale moonish face.  
“Arya…its been ages.” she says weakly, lamely because it feels like a generation since she last spoke to the other Stark girl. She isn’t just a little glad to see her sister, either, as her voice had brought her back from the brink of whatever that was a moment ago. Mostly. She wasn’t even going to think about Jon. What she had done against his good name...  
Arya walks up to her determined and angry, but she doesn’t say anything else. She balances from foot to foot, a gesture not unlike Jon when he was uneasy, worried.  
“I was just going to see Bran.” Sansa gestures her hand in the general direction of where her brother is currently convalescing. Her brother had yet to awaken, but if she was to keep up with the myriad lies she told today, she had to make sure she was there when her brother did finally awaken.  
“Mother’s told me to be nice to you. That you’ve been unwell since the time you got lost. But you’ve been extra weird.”  
“Arya, really, I should get going-"  
“I put a rat in your bed, did you notice?” Arya says as a non sequitur, she looks at her with piercing grey eyes and Sansa can’t but feel like she’s being judged and found wanting. Arya doesn’t wait for an answer,"Of course not, because you don’t even sleep there do you? You never even react anymore, you used to chase me around the castle saying I was a pest. I thought maybe you’d had a fight with mother. I thought you really might be ill. That you were sick and dying and everyone was being nice to you because any moment you were going to kick the bucket.”  
“Arya, what is this about?” She felt a terrible unease. Every moment away from Bran’s bedside could spell disaster. If she could just speak with him, tell him to keep what he had seen a secret, if only for a little while. It would give her time to convince her father to stay put and it would keep her mother from doing anything rash against the Lannisters. She felt like she was playing an indefinite game of “for now”. That damned letter! She didn’t even know wether her mother had even received it yet! What a weak, senseless woman, her aunt Lysa. That thrice damned letter was what had set her on this treacherous path. Forced her into using her brothers in this way. Though she had not intended it, the perceived relationship between herself and Jon was what had gotten the Queen to let down her guard, and Sansa had pounced on the opportunity. She should have slept in the rookeries! She should have deplumed every one of those birds! She felt very keenly like she was living in, and for, the moment. Barely keeping one pace ahead of destruction, even knowing how the timeline would unfurl. It was a terrible way to live, her father would not approve.  
“Then Jon left and he wrote a note! A note, Sansa! Like we were just—just acquaintances! And the whole castle was stupid with some unsaid thing that no one would talk about! So I put a rat in your bed, and I cut up all of your hair ribbons to bits, and threw your brooches in the pig sty. And you never even noticed! So, I know the truth now!"  
At this point Arya was nearly shouting, when she noticed she took a moment to compose herself and Sansa could see that she was clutching something behind her back, her fingers white with the strain. Her notebook.  
Oh, no…Stupid girl! She could almost hear Littlefinger’s sly laughter.  
Sansa takes a step forward and reaches for the small leather bound book. She thought she had burned that thing! She was sure she had! She hadn’t gotten much sleep. Things were starting to blur together, and every time she closed her eyes she saw green eyes staring back at her.  
“Arya, I can explain.”  
“Oh, can you? Can you really? You’re a big liar!”  
“Arya, please. Just-just come to my room. I’ll tell you anything you want to know—but please just be quiet and follow me. We-we can’t talk here like this. Please.”  
They made it into the privacy of her rooms, Sansa stripped the bed of its linens and stuffed them at the base of the door, between the stone of the entry way and the wood, it wouldn't block out the sound completely but it would muffle enough, should Arya begin to yell at her. Which by the look on her face seemed very likely.  
“It says you were dying in the godswood. It says father is to be beheaded.” Arya accuses. “You’re lying! You must be!”  
“Don’t be frightened, Arya.”  
“I’m not afraid!” she says, indignant.  
“Do you remember those stories Old Nan used to tell us, the ones about the dragon in the crypts of Winterfell?”  
“She said its whats kept the hot waters underneath the castle from running out. Don’t try to distract me! You said they were stupid stories and were too grown up for pretending!”  
“I know what I said!” her voice raised several octaves, then winces because she was trying to convince her sister, not get into an argument with her about past transgressions, regardless of how petty. Yet, Arya had no business going through her things! She smoothes down her dress, a nervous habit she’s always had, but had recently gotten under control. It was a testament of how easily Arya was able to ruffle all her feathers, that this childish habit returned.  
And then all of a sudden Sansa began to laugh, it was a shrill, unpleasant, almost hysterical thing. She looked at her sister's surprised face and laughed and laughed. All of her careful planing! Of all the things to be happening to her…Impaled by the Night King, traveling through time, watching her brother fall, reliving things helplessly, colluding with Cersei Lannister…! And here she was bickering with Arya over having read her diary! It was absurd in the most profound of ways. Arya watched her with concern in her eyes, Sansa’s face was red with exertion, tears were streaming down her cheeks.  
“Sansa!” Arya backpedaled, “Don’t cry! I-I, you can tell me if you’re dying! If you’re unwell, it’s alright that you write stories to..to make yourself feel better. Jonah’s sister, she writes stuff too…she calls them fan fictions on days when the pains in her chest are especially bad. I shouldn’t have read your diary. But you’ve been ignoring me…and now Jon’s gone too…”  
“What?” Confusion stopped her mid track, all thoughts flying out of her head like startled birds.  
“Your diary. I didn’t really understand a lot of it. Your penmanship is terrible! Why the tutors think the sun shine’s out of your arse is beyond me! That bit about about father was especially mean, but it said you were dying…” her sister bites her bottom lip in worry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know that I said I was trying for more magic, but now I'm just trying to maneuver as best I can through having Sansa mess with the timeline, the consequences of her actions or inaction,being visible to people much stronger than her. How can she keep her family safe when so many wheels are turning? She's just this one girl with a limited set of known occurrences. Hopefully I can answer these questions while still being entertaining.  
> Also anyone who has little sisters know that diaries are never safe...shame on Sansa! Is that a rookie mistake or portends of a more sinister agent?  
> And Jon, wtf is Jon?  
> Next chapter should clear some stuff up.  
> This is a slow burn,maybe even glacial.


End file.
